


Gray

by ashesandhoney



Category: Infernal Devices Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Childhood Friends, Canon Era, F/M, Government Conspiracy, Multi, Non-Graphic Violence, OT3, Slow Build, this is not a fluff fic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-29
Updated: 2016-09-15
Packaged: 2018-07-11 00:53:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,437
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7017790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashesandhoney/pseuds/ashesandhoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tessa Gray was not quite a Shadowhunter nor was she quite a warlock. </p><p>She didn't quite belong. She spent her childhood in the London Institute with William Herondale and Jem Carstairs and they didn't quite belong either. </p><p>The three of them were inseparable but nothing lasts forever.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One: London's Lonely Children

### I Can Never Go Home

 

William Herondale had been nothing but rude to all of them since the moment he had arrived. The smiling cook, the stern elderly maid, tiny fierce Charlotte Branwell, Henry Branwell with his absent comments, and even the other child at the Institute. He had been awful in every way he could imagine to be. Charlotte had responded by trying harder to reach out to him, to discipline him when he crossed lines. Henry seemed puzzled as though rudeness and cruelty were foreign to him. The girl had ignored him and he had pretended not to learn her name.

Then his parents had arrived at the door.

While Charlotte was downstairs, talking to them, he curled himself into the smallest ball he could and tucked himself into the corner between the bed and the night stand and sobbed. He tried not to, tried to bury it, tried to at the very least be silent but he failed on all counts.

She came and sat on the other side of the night table. She sat with her back to the wall and he couldn't see her face. Her feet in little slippers stuck straight out in front of her and he could see the hem of the pink dress she wore but not her. She was hidden from him and he was hidden from her. He gulped back as many of the tears as he could until they streamed silently.

"When my aunt came to get me, I hid on the stairs so I might have a last look at her but I didn't go and speak to her, not even to say goodbye. She is a mundane, though she and my mother were raised together, neither she nor my brother are Shadowhunters. They couldn't be allowed to stay," she said.

Her voice was soft and the American accent still sounded strange to Will. She was the only American he had ever met and the way her vowels fell together didn't sound right. She tapped her toes together as she spoke. He tightened his hold on his knees and wiped his eyes on his sleeve and tried to think up something that would chase her away. He had thought she would the easy one to make hate him. She glared at him and leapt to everyone's defense at the least provocation. Instead she sounded soft and gentle.

"Why didn't you just go back, you're hardly cut out to be a Nephilim," he said ignoring how hypocritical it was to declare that while he was the one with tears streaming down his face. He was the one who had no right being a warrior. He didn't belong in this place. He tucked his still healing fingers in under his armpits as though he could hide the evidence of his own repeated failures to learn anything. Cuts and nicks across his knuckles, a slash on the back of his hand that was going to scar, all evidence that he was bad at this. He didn't belong but he had no where else to go.

"I'm not," she said.

"Good on you, know thyself," Will drawled, his voice hiccuping and ruining the sarcasm.

"I am not a Nephilim but neither am I human. I could not return to the mundane world or the man who had killed my parents would have taken me again. They couldn't stay and Mr. Fairchild would not allow me to go with them, he said it was too much of a risk. I am a dangerous weapon," she said the last bitterly.

"What are you?" Will asked looking at the nightstand beside him as though he could see her through the oak but he could see nothing. She even tucked her feet in so he could see nothing. They sat on opposite sides of the nightstand, hiding from one another.

"I am a warlock," she said, "I have magic, I will live forever and I can never go home."

"I can never go home either," Will said.

  

### And Then There Were Two

 

Anyone who loved Will was cursed to die but here was someone who couldn't die. She was still a child but she was immortal. Later, eventually, he would come to question that logic but right then, twelve years old and desperate not to be completely abandoned, Will grabbed hold of Theresa Gray and assigned himself as her defender. She had come to the Institute at eight after two years spent with a pair of warlocks she would call only the Dark Sisters. She had spent four years as the only child in a house full of warriors that didn't want her there. She refused to share any other details and Will hadn’t gotten good enough at sneaking or picking locks to steal the records from Charlotte’s office yet.

Even at eleven, even as a girl and not a real Shadowhunter at that, Tessa was able to teach him how to hold weapons so he didn't cut his hands open. They sat in corners with piles of books that they left around for the maid to clean up. They sat through lessons together, scribbling notes on one another's paper and still managing to make it through their Latin verbs without failing. Tessa asked questions through lessons on Downworlders and politics and the Law and anything that could be asked about. Will glowered a lot but turned in the essays and wrote the examinations.

Four months after arriving in London, Will had started to feel like it might be a place where he could survive. He missed home in a way that he couldn't put into words. Sometimes, late at night when the Institute was silent and Tessa was lying in his bed with a candle and a novel, he'd think of trying. He'd plan out the words he would say to tell her of Wales and imagine what it would be like to take her through the same woods that he had played in with his sisters but those memories always silenced the urge to talk. It was enough to not be alone.

 

### On a Steamship from Shanghai

 

James Carstairs arrived in a flurry of activity and whispered admonishments to be polite and not bring up his 'condition' in case it upset him. Will and Tessa waited at the top of the stairs as he was ushered in by Clave officials in black coats and big hats. They leaned together, looking down at the boy with the dark hair and the trunk sitting in the middle of the floor. He didn't notice them. There were too many adults bustling around and making arrangements over his head for him to pay much attention to children hiding on the stairs.

"We should go say hello," Tessa said.

"You needn't be nice to everyone," Will grumbled.

"He's lost his parents, don't you think it'd be nice to be welcomed when you arrived?" she said.

"You didn't welcome me," he told her.

"I did and you called me a scrawny idiot for my trouble," she said crossing her arms and glaring at him. Still, she let him pull her away. They'd only known each other a few months but they had both decided where their loyalties lay. They were two against the world and some stranger with a sad story wasn't going to change that.

Charlotte found them in the training room laughing while Will failed to hit a target. She gave the two of them a stern look, "Did you forget that we had a new member of our household joining us today?"

"I'm sorry, Charlotte," Tessa had said dropping off the bench and coming over to the door to stand with Charlotte. Will envied how much Charlotte loved her. They were like sisters. Brown hair and the same tendency to sink into seriousness and that unwavering care for one another. Sometimes, when Charlotte was being bossy or when Tessa was making jokes, he was reminded of Ella and Cecily when he watched them. Then he would have to fight back the tears so mostly he just ignored them.

"I have been trying very hard to forget everything you say," Will said without turning around. He threw another knife and it landed wide and so he swore.

"William," Charlotte said.

"Don't be mean," Tessa said in Welsh. She had badgered a few phrases out of him and had been using that one like a weapon when he was particularly over the line.

"Your stance is wrong," a stranger's voice said.

"I told him that, but he doesn't listen to me, maybe he'll listen to you," Tessa was laughing to the stranger and an wave of protectiveness rolled through Will. He swung around and stalked over to this stranger, to the interloper boy who had no right to be making Tessa laugh like they were friends. He came to lean on her shoulder, his knives still in held between his fingers. She gave him a smile.

"Are you really dying?" Will asked.

Charlotte started to chastise him and he felt Tessa turn towards him and knew that she was giving him that angry hurt look she got when he lashed out at other people. He was busy staring at the boy with the dark eyes and the freshly cut hair falling over his forehead. He was tall for his age, taller than Will and Will took offense to that as well. He wanted very much to hate this person who was watching him with an infuriatingly even expression and the ability to make Tessa, his Tessa, laugh.

"I am," he said and Will started to fumble for an apology. Tessa had stepped on his foot and was leaning down but the boy shook his head. "Don't do that, don't be ordinary like that, don't apologize. Everyone is always apologizing. Say you'll train with me. I might be dying but I am better at throwing knives than you are."

Tessa snickered and Will kept staring at the dying boy. Tessa nudged him again and James Carstairs looked at her for a moment before looking back to Will and holding out his hand. Will, one arm still around Tessa, reached out and handed him a knife. Wearing his traveling clothes, from twice as far away as Will had been, he threw the knife and it hit in the red of the target and he smiled at Will.

"Very well, we'll train with you," he said.

 

### And Then There Were Three

 

Three children piled into a corner with a stack of books and a plate of jam on bread and their legs all draped over each other. More than once, Charlotte found them asleep in little heaps in odd places. In the library stacks and the drawing room by the fire. Once under a table. Once in Henry's laboratory while something they were meant to be watching boiled away merrily on the table top. Often in the training room when Tessa's body gave in to exhaustion before the boys’ did and somehow that meant they all had to pile into the window seat so she could fall asleep with her head on Will's shoulder and her feet curled up over Jem's lap.

Tessa's interest in training had gone from cursory and polite to voracious. She was determined to keep up with them even though her body lacked Shadowhunter strength and she had to train twice as hard to keep pace. Will and Jem slowed down for her. Jem stopped before he needed to, blaming his illness and allowing her to catch her breath.

They argued and fought. They had wars of pranks and jokes that made sense to no one else. Will disappeared into London some nights to come back with impossible stories that Jem laughed over and Tessa never quite believed. They built a world for themselves where no one slept alone and tickling someone until they could barely breathe was considered a sign of affection. Jem taught them Chinese which they punctuated with the more ridiculous Welsh phrases Will had finally relented to teach them.

Charlotte attempted to drag them into normal society, organizing little outings for Tessa with other Shadowhunter girls her age where she could wear pretty dresses and practice her rapidly calcifying societal manners. She endured them. Will hated them twice as much on her behalf and made sure to be doubly rude when he and Jem were sent out with boys they were meant to be building connections with.

"I'm not a Shadowhunter," Tessa argued when Charlotte pointed out that this was an excellent way to build a network of allies and that these would be the people that they would someday need to fight alongside with when they were old enough to join the war.

"Your mother was a Shadowhunter. Nephilim blood is dominant, Theresa, you are one of us. You are as much Shadowhunter as Will is and no one questions that he is Nephilim," Charlotte said.

"Will's mother is human, my father was a demon, that's a slightly different category," Tessa muttered later.

"She's right regardless, you're one of us," Jem told her in that soft earnest voice he used when he wanted them to pay attention to him. Tessa did. She watched him with a serious expression and let him gather her hands up in his. She usually tried to avoid letting either of them treat her like a lady but for a moment she let Jem hold her hands and pull her close. He watched her until she nodded.

She went to tea with Tatiana Lightwood and a Mayburn girl about the same age and Will watched her leave with an annoyed expression on his face. Jem fell in beside him. They were thirteen and Jem was still healthy more days than he wasn’t and Will pulled him off to go train until they were both exhausted.

"It's like putting a duck in a dress," Will said when they were lying on their backs, side by side, staring at the training room ceiling.

"I've never heard you do that before," Jem said and when Will didn't answer he kept going, "Say something cruel about her, I mean. I've heard you say awful things about everyone but never her. She looked very pretty in that dress."

"That's not what I meant," Will said and scrambled for the words as he waved his hand at the ceiling like they were there to catch. He did not talk about Tessa. He talked to Tessa but not about her. He wasn't sure which words to use to describe her. "Pick a fancier bird if you want. It's like a putting a swan in a dress. You take something strong and beautiful and meant to fly and you wrap it up in lace and send it to tea. She's a duck in a dress. It's ridiculous to send her off with those silly girls."

"Perhaps she likes those silly girls," Jem said but he was smiling at the description. Neither of them needed to say that what Will really resented was the separation. He resented Tessa being sent places without him.

 

### Life Isn't Fair

 

The first time Jem had a bad day, the first time he coughed up blood, he tried to refuse to see them. Tessa crept into his room once the Silent Brothers had gone and came to sit beside his bed. Will found her there when he arrived a moment later. They lay down on either side of him. He told them the entire story in a dry whisper until he was too tired to talk any more.

Demons and poisons and dead parents.

Tessa cried and raged over it later, while Jem was sleeping and it was just her and Will in the upper levels of the library. She stomped back and forth between the stacks while he leaned against a pillar and watched her. Will pretended he was the stoic one.

“It isn’t fair,” she said.

“Life isn’t fair,” Will said staring out the window but his heart was beating too fast. He was hiding the emotion but that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. He couldn’t even find the right name for it. It was anger in Tessa but anger didn’t feel quite right for what he was feeling. Horror maybe or dread. Dread. That was it. If someone was dying that meant that someday they would be dead. The idea of losing Jem had been abstract but now he had seen it. Jem would die like that: it bed, pale and drawn and coughing up blood with even the strength in his voice failing.

“I’m glad I’ll never have children. Did you know that warlocks can't? I always thought it was a loss but it isn't,” Tessa said.

“Why?” Will asked looking over at her.

“There are things out there, warlocks and demons and people, just regular people, who torture children. That demon tortured Jem because of what his mother had done. The sisters used to beat me because of what my father was and what they thought I could learn. If I never have children then no one can ever hurt them,” she said.

“There are good people in the world too, Tess,” he said.

“Not enough of them,” she said and then she’d turned and walked away. He chased after her and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. He didn’t argue with her, he just steered her back to Jem’s room. Tessa let him wrap her in a blanket and push her down into the chair by the fire. Then he read poetry to them both until Tessa was as deeply asleep as Jem.

 

### Imagined Futures

 

Tessa and Jem would drag Will away from fights that they could never get him to explain why he had even started. They would smooth over the worst of his lashing out and simply kept him away from anyone they thought he might verbally attack. Alone, in the library or the training room or piled up on someone's bed with notebooks and research for a paper some tutor had assigned, he was still sarcastic but he'd let the kindnesses slip in between his rants.

"I don't think I shall ever truly understand why he does that," Jem said to Tessa after they'd finished pushing Will away from Gabriel Lightwood. It was an event to honour the new Shadowhunters. The initiates, those who had turned 18 that year, were being honoured as they became full members of the Clave. Gabriel's older brother was among them and Charlotte would be presenting some commendations as Head of the Institute. The three of them had been brought along to show support and possibly as an attempt to coax them into socializing with other people.

"I think he simply dislikes Gabriel," Tessa said.

"You dislike Miss Mayburn and yet you restrain yourself from punching her in the face without the help of a dedicated staff of decent people," Jem said.

"I'm not Will," she said.

"I've noticed that about you to be quite honest."

"That's because you're cleverer than most."

Jem grinned at her. She was beautiful tonight but he wasn’t sure how to tell her that without it coming out awkwardly. She usually favoured the type of plain dresses that Charlotte wore or she simply kept her gear on for half the day. Tessa Gray in a party dress was something quite different. She was nearly 14 which was far too young to have her hair up but Shadowhunter society stood less on those sorts of formalities and her height made it easy for her to pass as older than she was. She looked older than Jem but he was still a growth spurt behind so she was taller than he was as well.

He managed to convince her to dance with him instead of the two of them worrying about what Will was up to in some corner of the party. Jem couldn't dance and Tessa had learned the steps in some finishing school class that she'd attended with Tatiana Lightwood and Louisa Mayburn but she'd never had a chance to practice. Charlotte didn't really care about all those little nuances of polite society so much so the concessions she made to any of their educations on that front were minimal.

Still they stumbled through the dance making mistakes and giggling about it. They gave up after that one dance and retreated to corners and watching others and Jem asked her questions in Chinese and she stumbled through her responses. She was getting better but not as quickly as Will was and that annoyed her. As though called by the thought, he reappeared over her shoulder as she was trying to remember how to say "dancing" and whispered the answer in her ear. She jumped.

"Stupid memosyne rune," she muttered.

"I'd be better than you even without it," he said.

"You can believe that all you want if it makes you feel better," she said.

"It looks like the dancing is done, they're setting up a podium," Jem said.

"Dear lord, so begins the slow removal of our collective intelligence via the numbing rambling of old men," Will said.

Jem made sure to sit Will between them during the droning speeches on bravery and honour and the importance of the Law and the presentations of awards for all those things. They were as numbing as Will had predicted. When Henry and Charlotte took the stage for their presentation, Henry made a joke that fell so utterly flat that it made them all cringe. Still Will snorted loudly more in surprise than laughter but it made Henry smile out at him.

"You and I should delay our pompous ceremonial thing," Will leaned into Jem and waved his hand at the stage, "So we can do it together, all three of us."

Jem shushed him and neither he nor Tessa answered nor did they bring it up. Tessa's heritage and her inability to bear runes would likely mean that she would never stand on a stage like that and the chances that Jem would live that long were even slimmer. They didn't say it.

It was a nice thing to imagine if no one had to think of the reality.

 

### Where You Belong

 

The library was stifling in the late August heat and they were working their way through lessons while the tutor went to hide in some room with more windows and likely a cold glass of spirits. They had stopped bothering to learn the tutors names because Will just drove them off. He almost made a game of it and Jem and Tessa took silent bets on how long it would take. This one wasn't expected to make Christmas.

"Bloody stupid magic," Tessa said and flung a book at the wall.

"Was the magic there, on the wall? Did you crush it in your fit of rage? Did the encyclopedia of spells really deserve that treatment?" Will asked.

"Why do I ever talk to you?" she asked.

"I think it's because I'm wonderfully charming," Will said.

"No, no, that's not it at all," Tessa said.

He was leaning back from the table with his book held up in front of his face and his foot braced on the edge. The chair wobbled on two legs but his balance was good enough to keep him up, at least it was until Tessa shoved him over backwards and he crashed to the floor. He came up swearing but she had already turned back to her papers so he righted the chair, sat down beside her, leaned into her personal space with an elbow on the table and drawled at her, "As cute as you are when you're angry, I think neither I nor that poor volume of spells deserved such treatment."

"Don't you dare try and flatter me, Herondale or next time I won't throw you on the floor, I will throw you out a window," she said.

Jem smothered a laugh and studious kept his attention on his own paper while watching them from under his eyebrows.

"That's beginning magic," Tessa said point at the book on the floor by the window. It was a heavy purple covered thing with gilt edges but there wasn't anything special about it. It looked like the hundreds of other books on the shelves in that soaring room.

"Offensive stuff that, all levitating feathers and changing the colour of your socks, terrible," Will said.

"I can't do it," she said.

"Neither can I," he said.

"That's not the same."

"Seems about the same to me."

"You're human."

"So are you."

"No, I'm not. That's the point. That's why I am here and why Charlotte's father wouldn't let me go home with my aunt and why those foul warlocks kept me in that foul room. I am not human and I certainly can't ever be a mundane nor will I ever truly be a Shadowhunter no matter what they say about my mother. If I am not human I should at least be able to change the colour of my socks and I can't even do that. Not human, not Nephilim, not warlock, not anything. I'm nothing," Tessa said.

"Singular is not the same as nothing," Jem said from across the table.

She looked up at him. He watched her with eyes that were nearly completely silver.

"He's right," Will said.

She nodded and pushed both hands back through her hair. She had picked up the nervous tick from Will and often moved to do it while her hair was styled and had to force her hands back down. This time she just pushed the braided strands loose and shook the entire mess out.

"It's just," she started and then stopped then tried again before finally saying, "I just wish I had somewhere where I belonged."

All his sarcasm fled for a moment and he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. From across the table Jem held out a hand and she took it, lacing their fingers together. They held onto her for a silent moment before Will broke the quiet.

"You belong right here," Will said. “Though if you do learn how to change the colour of socks, I’d love some in a nice rich mauve.”

 

### Family

 

Visitors to the Institute were hardly rare but still, the arrival of a carriage in mid-afternoon pulled everyone's attention from their studies. They piled into the window seat and craned their necks down to get a good look at it and try and make out the seal on the side or identify the livery of the footman. None of it was familiar from two stories up through thick glass. They were still arguing over possibilities when Charlotte appeared in the doorway.

"Tessa, may I speak with you?" Charlotte said.

The three of them froze in mid sentence. Tessa had been leaning on Jem's shoulder and she drew herself in and straightened up before she stood. Jem squeezed her hand and something about Charlotte's demeanor made Will hold onto her a moment before she pulled away.

It took approximately three minutes before Jem's curiosity got as strong as Will's and he agreed to go and eavesdrop on whatever conversation was happening between Charlotte, Tessa and the owner of the carriage. On their way downstairs, they heard voices echoing off the walls and Will turned toward the bedrooms with Jem on his heels.

"No," Tessa said.

"It's not a decision that either of us can refuse, Tessa, I've been trying all week," Charlotte said.

Tessa's voice shot up, "You've known for a week? And you didn't think to tell me?"

"The Clave has been trying to relocate you since you were nine years old. I have not informed you of every letter requesting your removal because they were all easily argued down. I did not want you to be worried over nothing," Charlotte said.

"This isn't nothing."

"He stopped writing on Tuesday. I hadn't heard anything since then and I thought the matter settled. This is unexpected. I didn't know-"

"Unexpected? Unexpected is the best you can come up with? This is somewhat more than unexpected. This is awful. I won't go. "

"They're family, Tessa, this could be a good thing."

"No, it's certainly not a good thing," Tessa said then a door slammed shut.

Jem kept his fingers twisted into a fist in the back of Will's shirt while they talked. They were around the corner and out of sight but hardly invisible. Charlotte appeared in front of them and they both jumped. It was sometimes easy to forget that she was a Shadowhunter not just a politician and she could be quiet as a ghost if she chose to be. Her lips were a thin line, her eyebrows drawn together. It was the kind of look she had turned on them the time they, well, Will, had been caught abusing glamour runes to taunt shopkeepers in the market.

"Give her a moment," Charlotte said.

"Who's in the carriage?" Will asked.

"Lawrence Starkweather. He's some sort of second cousin or some such thing to Tessa and has a daughter only a few years younger than her. The family has decided to bring Tessa home and there is nothing under any inch of Clave law that I can do to stop it. Don't think I haven't tried," Charlotte said.

"The same family that refused her when she was a little girl," Jem said in a voice that to anyone who didn't know him would have sounded even but there was a tremour of something else under it.

"She's still a little girl and none of us has the right to refuse her a home or a family," Charlotte said.

"They're strangers. This is her home. We are her family," Will said.

Before Charlotte could answer that, he had brushed around her. He was a good head taller than her but Charlotte always looked at him and saw the little boy with the red-rimmed eyes clinging to Tessa's hand and glaring that day after his parents had stopped knocking and gone. That he had said, "We," and not, "I," was not lost on Charlotte and she turned to watch him stalk away. She was left standing with Jem who didn't hide his feelings behind anger the same way that Will did. The look on his face was closer to grief than rage but he smiled at her through it and then went to follow Will.

Inside her room, Tessa sat on the floor and looked up at the open doors of her closet. Will sat beside her, silent for once, with his chin on her shoulder. She held a scrunched up piece of fabric in her hands. Jem paused in the door and then turned and went back to his room to dig through the trunk at the foot of his bed. he'd never gotten rid of it. He had kept it there full of the things he couldn't bear to look at everyday but also couldn't bear to be parted from. When he joined them. The calm before the storm had broken and Tessa was pacing and pulling things out of her wardrobe and adding them to a haphazard pile on her bed.

"This isn't forever," Jem said.

"When I was eight years old, everyone wanted me gone but Charlotte. Everyone. My aunt was sent away but she couldn't have managed the truth about me. She couldn't've. I know that now. Granville wanted me out of the Institute. The Clave wanted me out of the," she waved a hand, "Everything. They tried to give me back to the Starkweathers then. Like I was some nasty little prize in a game of pass the parcel. Charlotte tried to keep me from hearing any of it but I remember Granville in his study saying that they 'Wouldn't take the brat,' and so I stayed here and Charlotte made sure that they were kind to me. She was only seventeen and I thought there was nothing she couldn't do. Why do they want me now?"

"To marry you off for political gains perhaps," Will said.

She turned and looked at him with alarm on her face before growling, "Let them try."

"It isn't forever," Jem said again and he held out a hand to her. She crossed the room to him and let him pull her into a hug. Will came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist. They held her as Jem continued to talk in a soft rational voice.

"You've got four years until you're 18. If they take you in then they claim you as family, if they claim you as family then you are legally Nephilim regardless of anything else. At 18, you can decide where you will live and where you will serve and you can come home. You've already survived worse than a manor house in Alicante," he said.

"I don't want to leave," she said.

"We'll be down to visit in two weeks for the meeting at the Gard. We'll sneak away, the three of us and run around the city until they catch us. Maybe we'll just come visit next Tuesday, just slip down the tunnel into the Gard while no one is looking and show up on your front step," Will said.

"You promise me that?" she asked.

"I swear on my parents, my family name and everything I hold dear, we'll come visit as often as we can. This isn't forever," Jem said. "And I want you to have something."

He had unwrapped the necklace in his room and he pushed back her hair to clasp it around her neck. She stood in the circle of his arms and tilted the pendant up to look at the design. It was bright green jade with an inscription on the back. He didn't tell her what it said or more than that it had been his mother's.

"I can't take something that belonged to your family," she said.

"You're my family. I had thought everything I loved was lost when I left Shanghai but you, both of you, are home for me. Home isn't a place, it's the people in that place. Carry a little piece of me with you and we'll all find our way back together, eventually. If not in this life, then I'll wait for you in the next," he said.

The air around them crackled. Will and Jem drew back on instinct but didn't let go of her. Power like the static electricity of a lightning storm hovered around them. They didn't step away as a piece of her hair fluttered up off her cheek and then back down again. Everyone was silent. They were barely old enough to be sent out on missions and Will had only ever seen a warlock work once when Magnus Bane had done a locator spell for Charlotte a year before. Jem hadn't seen much more magic than he had. Still, there was no doubt. Magic eddied around her like a current.

She pulled off the other necklace she was wearing and dropped it over Jem's head. A little clockwork angel, standing about as tall as a pinky finger with hands clasped over its heart and a slow tick somewhere inside. She had always had it. It's ticking was as familiar to them as it was to her. She flattened her palm to it so it was held tight against his chest.

"It's got a protection spell on it, I don't understand it but it was meant to keep my life safe. Now it's going to watch over you. You're going to stay alive and we're going to find a cure and we're all going to be happy someday," she said.

Jem felt the magic press forward. In any other context, he might have panicked but it was Tessa. Will stood at over her shoulder and frowned at him. She was using magic that he knew she didn't understand but no one stopped her. When it was done, when the magic faded and it was just a necklace ticking against his chest, it didn't seem real. She dropped back on her heels and stared with wide eyes.

She didn't explain it. They didn't ask.

The rest of the afternoon, they procrastinated and dragged their feet and avoided the man who rather stiffly called himself Uncle Lawrence when he was introduced. Will gave her a collection of books from the extensive shelves in his room which he usually jealously guarded, even from her. They avoided her room where the maid had been assigned the job of actually packing for her. Tessa hung close to them both except for the half hour she spent shut up in the study with Charlotte.

Lawrence Starkweather was given a room and plans were made to leave in the morning. Tessa spent the night curled up in Jem's bed, cuddled in between the two people she trusted most. They hadn't been apart for more than a day since they'd met and the prospect of two weeks before so much as a visit made it hard for her to breathe. She spent more time watching them sleep then she spent asleep herself.

"Life is a wheel and some souls are meant to be together. Life will turn and we will be here again," was the last thing Jem said to her.

"Don't fold pages in my books, I'll see you soon," was the last thing that Will said to her.

She sank down against the cushions in the carriage with a stranger sitting across from her and watched the gates close behind them.

 

### And Then There Were Two


	2. Part Two: Missing Pieces

### The Dark Side of the Moon

Tessa Gray never saw the Starkweather manor house in Idris. When, true to their promise, Jem and Will showed up there to pay a call and mock her for being too fancy to return a letter, they found the house closed up for the season. The Starkweathers had been given a posting abroad to head up the Bombay Institute and the entire Indian subcontinent. Their neighbour said it was rather sudden but that they had been thrilled to be given the offer. Bombay rivaled London in size and though it wasn't as old as some of the European Institutes, it was a prestigious appointment. 

"I suppose that explains why it's taking her so long to receive the post," Will said.

They sat on the front steps of the closed up manor house and waited for the carriage they had hired to come back at the agreed upon time. They'd already gone over the grounds twice and talked to neighbours on both the east and west sides. Jem was nearly silent and Will's sarcasm had taken on a vicious edge that he usually saved for particularly vexing strangers or Charlotte when she tried to be kind to him. In the past two years their separations had most often been measured in hours, not weeks but it was more than missing her that set them on edge. 

Nothing about it felt right. Her silence. The suddenness. None of it. 

Tessa hadn't been sent to India with the rest of the family. It would take Charlotte another two weeks to verify that and that verification would come not from the Starkweathers themselves but from a travel manifest that didn't list Theresa Starkweather or Tessa Gray or any young woman of fourteen years old at all.

"So where has she gone? Timbuktu? The dark side of the moon?" Will exploded as soon as he had heard the news. 

Charlotte shared this news over dinner. She held the paper tightly enough that it had crinkled on one side and her eyes were hard. Jem forgot sometimes that she wasn't much more than twenty, she wasn't even ten years older than he was. She looked both older than she usually did and much younger as she held Will's gaze. She was as furious as he was but holding it better. 

"Bìzuǐ," Jem snapped kicking Will in the ankle before he could let that spool out into a rant. Will glared at him but Jem wasn't looking at him now that he was quiet. 

"You know something more than you're sharing," Jem said to Charlotte. 

"It was suggested when she had first arrived that she be sent to the Spiral Labyrinth for training. Neither my father nor the consul was particularly fond of having a warlock child in the Institute. Henry and I were able to conclusively prove her parentage and earn her the right to Clave protection. That protection was begrudgingly granted but their resistance changed nothing, her mother was a Shadowhunter, Shadowhunter blood is dominant. She is one of us and deserved that protection," Charlotte said. 

"They tried to have her removed before this," Jem said. 

Will had fallen silent, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting back his chair and making a valiant attempt at looking intimidating. He was too skinny and his surliness still had too much of a child's insolence for it to really work. Charlotte ignored him. Charlotte was quite good at ignoring him. 

"Rather more often than seemed quite normal. Did you know one of the heads of the Barcelona Institute, I think it was, married a Faerie? The Clave turned a blind eye to having her inside an Institute," Henry threw in. 

"Historical precedents aside, it was unusual. Her abilities never manifested but we have the records of what they were expected to be from the warlocks she was taken from as a child. She could be exceptionally powerful if her magic ever came in. I suspect that is what was behind the attempts to have removed to other Institutes or to the Academy," Charlotte said. 

"The Clave doesn't care about a warlock's powers," Jem said. 

"That's what I would have thought but as Will pointed out, she went somewhere. Perhaps there are allies among the warlocks who wanted to take her on as an apprentice," Charlotte said. 

"Because her first experience as a warlock's apprentice went so well for her," Will said and then slammed back from the table and left the room without another word. 

### Training Sessions

Her room was separate from the other students but she could see the yard where they did their training drills if she could manage to sit at the exact right angle in her window. The glass didn't open but it did offer a view of woodland and beyond, the city of Alicante. She sat there and read the books Will had packed for her and tried to catch glimpses of other students because it made it all seem a little more normal. She called them the other students to try and convince herself that that was all she was as well. 

She wasn't continuing with any of the education she had received at the Institute. She was not studying demonology or weaponry or research techniques nor was she studying combat or taking part in drills. Each night, she spent a little bit of time after the lights went out reminding herself of the drills in part to maintain some of her strength and in part because those memories were comforting to sink into. Memories of Jem letting her land blows even though they both knew he was too fast for her. Memories of Will showing off and elbowing her to make sure that she had seen it. 

"We need you to dedicate yourself to this training before we allow in any distractions," came the calm and even answer from Miss Cartwright when Tessa had suggested a visit. 

Dedication was becoming a theme in every conversation. Dedication to training. Dedication to Clave and Covenant and the Angel and likely to the importance of well polished shoes. She was told nothing beyond the importance of dedication to the cause. She was going to take up her place in the war against the demons, she was important and it would take years of training and dedication for her to truly reach her potential. 

In the first few days it had all seemed exciting. The very prospect of her magic terrified her but she sat up in bed each morning and reminded herself that those were the fears of a little girl who had been too small and had understood too little and was being held by monsters who had hurt her.  She wasn't a tiny child anymore. She could learn to control the magic and put it to some use.

The fantasy of returning to London with power and respect and all the rights and responsibilities of a Shadowhunter name wasn't without its appeal. She would no longer be the tag along girl that the boys had to make allowances for but rather someone impressive. 

But the refusals came thick and fast. 

No, she would not be able to join the students in the dining hall. 

No, she would not be allowed to explore the Academy grounds or buildings. 

No, not even the library. 

No, she would not be receiving letters. 

No, she could not have guests. 

It was all distraction and so she could have nothing but her classroom and her bed chamber and occasionally a supervised stroll outside. Excitement and fantasies faded quickly to a wary quiet. She was reminded of the first days at the Institute when she had refused to speak to anyone, when Charlotte had been the only one to even try to coax conversation out of her. The walls here were not the dark stone of London but a honey colour that gleamed in the sunshine but the way the emptiness echoed was familiar.

But here, no one came to coax conversation and offer sweets and build slow friendships. 

It was lonely but it was tolerable.

Then her lessons turned from theory and parlour tricks to the feeling of her bones shifting under her skin until she fainted from the pain. Her mind had blocked out the memory of that feeling until it rushed over her and she was left curled on the floor with her instructor hovering over her while her vision swam back into focus and her stomach churned. 

The instructor was a woman with cold eyes that were pale blue from lid to lid and a pair of neat little horns poking up out of her carefully styled dark hair. She sat with Miss Cartwright in the bright, well appointed classroom and wrote notes on the blackboard in neat looping script. No one else ever came to visit. Miss Cartwright wore neat gray dresses and had runes on her arms and just her presence was enough to remind Tessa that this was a Clave project and that she was safe. 

They all seemed so civilized. 

They seemed so far from from the dark dank basement where the Dark Sisters had whispered threats at a little girl. 

But just like the sisters had done, the instructor had grabbed Tessa's wrist and forced the magic up into her very bones until she had screamed.  

"You're making progress, Miss Gray, this is very exciting," Miss Cartwright had said after the first blindly painful change. 

In response, Tessa flipped onto her back in a sparring move Jem called 'barely suitable for a bar brawl' and Will called 'effective' and kicked Miss Cartwright in the face with both feet and all the strength she could call up. Tessa knew, in a vague way, that many Shadowhunter girls didn't train the way that their brothers did. She knew Tatiana Lightwood could barely hold a sword properly but this was Alicante and the Academy and Miss Cartwright was someone very official.

She hadn't expected to ever have an advantage over a Nephilim in a fight but she sent Miss Cartwright flying and the other woman did not even try to hit her back. Tessa hit her twice more before she reeled back to fall into a fighting stance in the middle of the room. Her heart pounded. Pain and adrenaline and all that childhood fear building up like something tangible in her body. She needed to run. She wanted to go home. She wanted to cry and just give in to being a little girl for a few moments. 

"I'd like to leave now," Tessa said with all the authority she could muster. As close to Charlotte's voice as she could come. She would not cry. 

"I'm afraid that's not possible," Miss Cartwright said. 

Miss Cartwright by that point was leaning against a wall with blood pouring from a shattered nose that she held with one hand and the dagger she wore at her belt was in Tessa's hand. Tessa stood in the middle of the room, all her attention on the Nephilim woman. She'd grown up among Shadowhunters. She'd always been taught that a Shadowhunter was the most dangerous person in the room and that was a point of pride.

She had inherited just enough Shadowhunter arrogance to think she was safe to ignore the warlock. 

She wasn't expecting a hand on the back of her neck and that same bone crunching rush of magic to shoot down her spine and drop her to the floor again. 

After that her training sessions lost most of the veneer of gentility. 

### Not a Single Piece of Paper

  
Charlotte Branwell had slightly more reach than a pair of fifteen year old boys but when she found herself in the records of the Silent City, sifting through transfer requests and the paper trails of Institute assignments across the world, she also found something she wasn't expecting. Her intention was figure out where Tessa had been sent and to build a case that would prove that transferring her there ran contrary to the law. She began with the Institute assignment documents and then moved onto family records. 

The Starkweather's assignment to Bombay had come only a week before the first letter Charlotte had received about their desire to bring Tessa home. It was rushed. There were complaint letters in the file from the Bombay Enclave about the decision. They had been expecting the appointment to go to one of their own. The letters of complaint came from multiple families and all were recorded as 'dismissed' on the file and the Starkweather appointment had been upheld with little explanation. 

Charlotte tapped the pile of papers back into a neat stack and put it back in the file box. The Consul could make decisions like that but it was rare for it to run so completely against the wishes of the local Enclave. Even Charlotte's own appointment hadn't been so widely rejected. The grumbling about giving the post to her and Henry hadn't, to the best of her knowledge, even made it to letter writing. She brushed imaginary dust off the box and considered checking the London file out of sheer curiosity but there were other things she needed to know. 

Tessa had rarely used the Starkweather name but Charlotte had always believed that she had full rights to it. To be a Gray and not a Starkweather had been an angry little girl's choice between the family that didn't want her and the family she couldn't return to. The Grays had loved her. The Starkweathers hadn't. She had chosen the name for that reason alone. 

Charlotte returned the box to the shelf and headed down through the stacks. There was no dust in here but there was something in the air that made it feel old and musty. The promise of dust. Some heaviness in the very atmosphere reminded her she was far below the ground though the ceiling soared out of sight above her. She wove through the stacks taking soft steps as though she could disturb someone if she made too much noise. 

She smoothed an errant bit of hair out of her eyes as she scanned the labels on the edges of the shelves to find her next target. Tessa had been the first other girl that Charlotte had ever spent any extended time with. She had grown up with a father who raised her as much like a boy as he could manage. She did not bother with gowns or roses or hair stylists. There were more important things to attend to. 

Tessa used to pout until serious teenage Charlotte would let the little girl, and she had been so little back then, brush out and braid her hair over and over again. She would probably always remember sitting in the park while Tessa braided flowers into her hair and they watched the mundanes from behind a glamour. Tessa had also been repeatedly disappointed that Charlotte had the option of buying beautiful gowns and rarely did. For a girl who spent most of her time in gear, Tessa had a remarkably stubborn fashion sense. Charlotte tugged her hair back into the plain bun and put those memories out of her mind. 

She finally found the family records and pulled down the Starkweather family tree and related records from the last fifty years. They had taken Tessa, they had a right to do so but it came with a responsibility. There were few domestic crimes that the Clave punished more harshly than a neglected child. Losing a child, as far as Charlotte could tell, was a pretty severe form of neglect. She flipped through the pages, just skimming, this was a formality for the case she would bring to the Consul. She just needed to prove that the Starkweathers had a responsibility to Tessa. 

She expected it to be easy. 

She looked down at the birth records and realized she'd somehow found herself in 1820 without finding either of the certificates she needed. She started going back again. Tessa's mother had have been born in the 1830s at the earliest but going through the entire decade left her with nothing. There was no birth certificate. Nor was there a death record for the mundane girl who had died in Adele Starkweather's place after being switched at birth. Charlotte had remembered filing Elizabeth Gray's details in this box herself. 

Nothing.

Nothing for either of them. 

Charlotte flipped forward. Tessa had been born in 1862. That should have been an easy piece of paper to find because it was a mundane birth certificate, not a Clave one. Different paper, smaller, it should have stood out. It didn't. 1860, a boy born to a branch of the Starkweathers living in Berlin. 1864, a girl born to the Alicante Starkweathers. Nothing in between. No evidence of anything being removed. Charlotte had a little sheaf of note cards she had been instructed to leave in place of any removed document so that anyone else could know who to come to to find them. It was a neat system. This was the first time Charlotte had ever seen it violated. 

She frowned and slid her chair back from the study carrel to look over the box as though the papers she needed had just fallen to the side. Then another thought crossed her mind. 

She pushed back from her desk and headed back into the records. She didn't worry so much about being quiet any more. Her feet tapped out a rapid little drumbeat as she hurried back into case files and straight to London. She knew where this was off the top of her head and her feet took her there without needing too much thought which was good as her thoughts were rushing as she dragged over a ladder to climb up to a shelf she had no hope of reaching on her own. The ladder shrieked along the stone floor but the sound didn't echo. 

"I'm very sorry," Charlotte said. 

She whispered it as though there were Silent Brothers standing at her shoulder who could hear her. There were not. She was alone as she scrambled up the ladder and pulled out a box annotated in her father's handwriting. Rather than take it back to a desk, she balanced it on a rung of the ladder and stuffed the lid into a nearby shelf and started to sift. 

Nothing. 

There wasn't any evidence of Tessa's arrival aat the Institute or the investigation that had led them to the Dark Sisters or even the Dark Sisters themselves. Charlotte shoved the box back into place without straightening the papers and climbed another few rungs up to grab another one. This one was one of hers. 1873. There was a record of Tessa and Will in it. Or there should have been. She had written it. The final decision that neither of them were suited for the Academy and would be educated in London. An innocuous piece of data that no one would want. It was missing as well. 

Charlotte sat down on the floor, leaned her back against the boxes from 1819 and stared up at the wall of record boxes and the empty spaces where this year's would be put. She already knew that hoping for misfiled paperwork was an impossible dream. If she went through every piece of paper in the building, she wouldn't find a single piece with Tessa's name on it. 

As far as this room was concerned, Tessa Gray had never existed at all.  

### How to Send a Letter

  
In spite of all of Will's declarations and Charlotte's increasingly frustrated digging and Jem's quiet research, life went on. 

Jessamine Lovelace came to the Institute and spent as much time throwing kindnesses back in people's face as Will had when he had arrived. Will despised her instantly for the crime of not being Tessa. Jem gave her the benefit of the doubt over and over and each time she said something awful and so eventually he stopped trying altogether. The two of them sank further into a world that didn't have room for anyone else. They lapsed into Chinese more and more often until they were almost unintelligible to anyone else. 

Will drove off tutors and picked fights and disappeared for hours with no notice or explanation. Jem would apologize on his behalf after the fact or simply grab Will by the collar and pull him out of a room. Will still expected Tessa to kick him when he said something rude or terrible and each time she wasn't there to do it, what came out of his mouth was worse than he had intended. Whether it was the loss itself or the loss of her influence was impossible to tell but Will got worse as he got older. 

"Care to explain this?" Charlotte asked one day, nearly two years after Tessa had disappeared. She stood in the door to the drawing room and pursed her lips at Will who had his boots up on the chaise and lolled his head back to look at her and raise his eyebrows. 

"It's quite simple really, when one wishes to send correspondence, one writes it in a letter and then places the letter in an envelope-" Will started. 

"I am quite aware of how the post functions," Charlotte snapped. 

"It is a collection of letters you are holding, is it not? Is it the use of stamps that confuses you so?" Will asked.

Charlotte crossed the room and dropped the little pile of letters on his chest. There were about twenty of them tied together with twine. He picked them up and noted his own handwriting on the address. He quirked a bit of a smile and Charlotte glared at him. Will swung his long legs around to sit up properly. 

"I told you to stay out of it," Charlotte said. 

"And that's done us all a world of good," Will said. 

Charlotte's expression darkened and her eyes narrowed as she said formally, "The Bombay Institute requests that we cease and desist in this correspondence." 

"I will happily if they decide to ever answer any of the letters. I had assumed that they were lost in the post system so I simply sent another. It seemed the most reasonable assumption as no one ever answered them," Will said. 

"You have sent one every month for nearly two years," Charlotte said. 

"For the first few months it was weekly. I've grown more restrained in my old age," Will said. 

"Stop," Charlotte said. 

"I refuse to give up on her," Will said. 

"Antagonizing everyone in the Clave in all corners of the globe is not helping matters," Charlotte said. 

"Neither is anything you're doing," Will snapped back. 

Charlotte stared at him. Her expression was even and cold. Then she stormed out of the room and slammed the door behind her. Will watched her go with his conscience twinging at him. That wasn’t fair and it wasn’t kind and he hadn’t even had to think about it, the cruelty had just rolled out of his mouth like a reflex. It used to require thought. He used to have to try. 

He waited until he could be reasonably sure that Charlotte was gone and then snatched up the pile of letters and went to find Jem. Jem was sitting in the weapons room, sorting and polishing daggers and lining them up in neat rows. Will sat down beside him and leaned his head down against Jem’s shoulder and pressed close. 

Sometimes after one of his barbed comments had worked particularly well, Will did this. Tessa used to rub his back and ask him why he had done it after he’d been particularly awful to someone. Jem wasn't as soft about it but he was as consistently kind about it. Jem threw an arm around him and hugged him without actually looking up from his collection of weaponry. Will cuddled in more than he usually allowed himself too. Usually he kept his boundaries higher than this, even with Jem. 

“Bad news?” Jem asked. 

“No news,” Will said and he dropped the bundle of letters on the neat stack of blades, knocking them out of order. Will knew Jem was frowning at him but he kept his head down and pretended he hadn’t noticed the mess he’d made of all Jem’s work. 

“William,” Jem said as he unwrapped the bundle of letters and read the first one. 

“My penmanship was terrible back then wasn’t it?” Will said. 

Jem kept sorting papers and Will kept staring off into space and letting the points of contact between himself and Jem become the only real things in the world. Knee, hip, shoulder, arm, forehead, Jem’s hair brushing his face a little bit. Warm and close and that burnt sugar smell in his nose and a little bit of the scent of metal oils and clean laundry. 

“So when are we leaving?” Jem asked. 

“Leaving?” Will asked. 

“You didn’t open the package? Never mind, of course you didn’t, read this,” Jem said holding out a piece of paper to him. 

There was one letter tucked into the bundle that wasn’t written in his own hand, it hadn’t even been put in an envelope, just a fold of note paper stuck between two of his. He took it from Jem and flipped it open. It was written by Starkweather’s youngest daughter in neat penmanship. Will read it twice, sitting up straighter as he did. 

The letter suggested that Melody’s father had been in negotiations with someone at the Academy in Alicante shortly before they had left for India. She also suggested strongly that Will cease and desist with the letters because they sent her father into a rage but he didn’t finish reading that paragraph because he didn't really care. 

“If she were just at the Academy she would have written. It wouldn’t be such a ridiculous secret,” Will said.

“I want to go and check,” Jem said. 

Jem had Tessa's clockwork angel between his thumb and forefinger as he spoke. He held rolled it back and forth or just traced the wings when he was nervous. 

“You should probably be the one to go to Charlotte, I think she’d kill me if I walked through her office door right now,” Will said. 

“William.” 

Will shrugged and now that he was sitting up, he let the pieces of his persona slide back into place. Jem studied him with a look that very clearly said that he wasn’t fooled. Jem said nothing but he stood when Will did and pulled him into a hug. 

“She’s out there somewhere,” Jem said into his ear and then walked out of the room, leaving Will the scattered papers and the daggers to clean up. He dropped himself into the chair that Jem had left and started sorting out the letters, carefully going through each page to make sure that there was nothing else hiding in them. There wasn't. Just his own increasingly sarcastic messages and that one note about the Academy. 

### Careful Lies

 Tessa was quiet. She had always been a quiet person but these days she spent more time silently watching than she spent doing just about anything else. After making the first painful change, she had gotten good at it fast. Her tutor thought she was progressing at a somewhat slow pace and assigned her extra practice regularly. The slips and the inability to call back a previous change were carefully planned. She worked out each day what she had done the day before, she kept a journal that the tutor thought was a sign of dedication and she filled it with her previous changes and her progress.

It was dedication but not to learning. 

Where she had fought to keep up in physical training, here she fought to keep from advancing too fast. The lie probably achieved nothing but a stubborn part of her liked the fact that she could do something they couldn't and it was the only thing in her life she could control. 

"I want you to focus, you are reaching into their mind, searching for a memory, just as you would do in your own memories. I want to know his wife's name," Miss Cartwright sat well back from Tessa as she asked this question. She rarely got within ten feet of Tessa since the incident where bother her nose and her left cheek bone had been broken. 

The man was a Shadowhunter named Bernard Montcalm, stationed in Belgium and born in France. His favourite food was Camembert cheese on fresh baked bread. He had been afraid of spiders as a child and was particularly fond of his two dogs who he had taught to hunt. His wife's name was Amelie and she had green eyes and was very beautiful but Bernard thought she was a bit stupid. They knew the Cartwright family and Tessa now knew that her Miss Cartwright's given name was Gloria, a piece of information she stored away in case she needed it later. 

"I don't know, it doesn't work like that. How many times do I need to explain it?" Tessa snapped. 

She claimed to be able to access only thoughts that were going through the minds she changed into at the time that she changed and some background information like language and muscle memory. In the case of being asked to change while touching an object, she argued it must be the last moment that they touched the object that left her with an imprint of their thoughts at only that moment. That was a lie. She could delve back into a change's memories to whatever point she wanted. At least for mundanes. It was nearly impossible with vampires, frustratingly inexact with warlocks and sometimes hazy with werewolves when the wolf instincts confused the process, faerie changes were almost impossible to even make. She'd only ever been able to hold a fae body for thirty seconds and hadn't had any access to their memories during that window. 

Still. She was far better at it than she claimed. 

Miss Cartwright continued to press her and Tessa sat there and rifled through Bernard Montcalm's head looking for anything she wanted to know. He wasn't a fan of the Accords and thought that England's Shadowhunters were going to hell in a hand basket thanks to the ridiculous head of the Lond0n Institute and his pushy wife. Tessa had to suppress a smile at that observation. 

"Anna?" Tessa guessed. 

"We're done for today," Miss Cartwright said with a sigh as though Tessa had disappointed her greatly. The first few weeks, those sighs had been motivating. She had wanted to do well because she had believed them when they had told her she could be helpful to protecting the world. Now those sighs were just grating. They were another tiny note of manipulation in a day filled with small lies. 

Tessa stood and managed to quell the urge to call her Gloria before she turned to leave the room because the satisfaction wasn't worth losing the advantage of keeping some of her magic to herself. She glanced back at the warlock tutor who had never introduced herself by name and Miss Cartwright. They sat in that room like this was just a classroom and not a prison. Tessa opened the door and let her mind wander to curling up with one of Will's books, she still called them Will's books even though it had to be close to two years since she'd last seen him. 

"And Miss Gray?" 

Tessa turned to look back at her. 

"I think it's time your training was expanded, we'll be moving you to another facility within a week, you should start to pack your things."

 

### At the Academy

It had been Jem who had managed to convince Charlotte to allow them to enroll in a special program at the Institute. It was technically a course designed for adult Shadowhunters to train them in higher understanding of faerie court structures so they would better be able to run negotiations. It was the soonest that a course was starting at the Academy that didn't require that they enroll in the actual youth course of study. Jem had made the case that his father had attended the Academy and as much as he loved London, he wanted a chance to really see the heart of Nephlim culture before he died and what better chance to spend two months living in Alicante? Charlotte had relented her arguments pretty quickly and had pulled some strings to make it happen.

The course work was far and beyond their abilities as poorly trained sixteen year olds. Assumptions were made that the students already knew how to write treaty proposals and treaty articles and had read certain books on negotiation tactics. Neither of them had any of that prior learning. Thye were surviving it. Will was good at figuring out people and found that he liked breaking down all the alliances and ranks and known rules. Jem would rather spend his life on a battlefield than in a negotiations chamber but he studied and kept his head down and they were not doing as poorly as they might have.

They might have been doing better if they'd been spending their evenings and free days studying and reading up on all the things they didn't know.

They instead spent their free time poking around at everything and anything in hopes of finding some bit of evidence that they could follow back to Tessa or just a whisper of Tessa or just a hint that the note from Melody Starkweather wasn't a prank or wildly off base. It was the only lead they'd had in years and the idea that it would be an empty one ate at Jem. They had been there a week and were prowling around the training grounds of the youth program and finding nothing there just as they'd found nothing anywhere else.

"I didn't think they let degenerates like you in here," a voice said.

Standing at the edge of a brutal looking obstacle course was Gabriel Lightwood and a few other young men Jem had never seen before. There were three of them peering at Will and Jem without actually getting up. One had his gear open to allow for an iratze to be drawn on what looked like a dislocated shoulder. Gabriel had dirt smeared across one cheek and his hair was askew. Jem had never seen him looking anything less than utterly put together in a gentleman's suit. Gabriel spent the majority of his time at the Academy and had never gone on a hunt in London that Jem could remember.

"While their standard of degeneracy leaves something to be desired, they at least have the decency to keep soft little things like you away from the real battles happening out there in the world. You're demon hunting exercises have nothing on Raum demons in a Whitechapel alley," Will said.

"William," Jem muttered but he crossed his arms and stood with his shoulder nearly touching Will's. He was aware of the clockwork angel's little heart beating away against his chest. Sometimes it was noticeable, sometimes it wasn't. Right now he was almost as aware of it as he was aware of Gabriel's expression and the potential for Will to hit him. 

"What are you doing here, Herondale?" Gabriel asked.

"Bringing up the standard of company in this entire establishment. My presence almost balances out the vague stink of you," Will said.

One of Gabriel's friends laughed and Gabriel shot him a look and apparently he either had a reputation or being a Lightwood was enough to earn him some respect because the other boy shrugged and apologized. Then as Gabriel turned back to look at Will again, the other boy seemed to change his mind and added in an imitation British accent that did nothing to hide that he was not British, "I'm sure he's a right bastard there Gabe."

"Fuck off then Joe," Gabriel said with a little bit of a sneer on the name like it was an insult.

"We're leaving, good luck with your course, Gabriel," Jem said and he grabbed Will and hauled him away towards the edge of the training ground. Will flashed Gabriel some sort of rude gesture then turned to walk beside Jem like he was a civilized human being and not a drunk trying to start a brawl.

"Must you?" Jem asked.

"Only when it's that pompous twit," Will said.

"He might be a pompous twit but he's a Lightwood and that's not nothing. I hear his brother's in line for some big appointment as soon as he finishes his year abroad," Joe said. 

The laughing boy from Gabriel's little squad, fell into step on Will's other side. He still wore muddy gear and had finished marking an iratze on his injured classmate though he still held the stele. He was younger and shorter than Jem had first guessed. He barely came to Will's shoulder and his dark brown hair was held down in places by the same slick of mud that was all over his gear.

"True, it means his pompousness is inherited but that's hardly something to be proud of," Will said.

"I liked Gideon," Jem added.

"You like everyone. You have terrible taste," Will said.

"Evidently as I agreed to continue to be friends with you," Jem said.

"So, you're new students then?" Joe asked.

"No, just here for a politics course, another few weeks," Will said.

Joe's real name was Giuseppe Moschella. He was 14, an ascendant after his family had been killed in a demon attack when he was ten, and he apparently had no qualms about sharing his life story with a pair of complete strangers. Will had also grown up in a mundane household but he didn't share this information as they walked back toward the cluster of buildings. Instead Will started asking questions.

"They just reopened the upper floors of the Whitelaw wing," Giuseppe said and Jem wanted to shake him and tell him they already knew that. Will kept prodding for information and Jem kept his mouth shut. They'd been up through the Whitelaw wing on their third night and found a collection of empty classrooms and a few suites of rooms probably for low ranking faculty on the upper floors.

"Renovations?" Will asked.

"Officially" Giuseppe said as though this was the greatest bit of gossip. Jem cut his eyes to Will but Will had put aside his usual sarcasm in favour of a politician’s smile. He looked genuinely fascinated. Giuseppe lit up 

“You’ve heard of the Scholomance?” Giuseppe said. 

“They’re a Clave branch that specialized in the investigations and offenses that went beyond what local Institutes could manage on their own. It’s been shut down for years now,” Will said as promptly as if he were an attentive schoolboy. He had never been an attentive schoolboy but it was a decent impression. Jem almost jumped in with the sarcastic comment that Will left out. 

“There was a branch of the Scholomance called the Carcere and it hasn’t been shut down. Oh, it officially has never existed at all but a friend of my cousin worked for them. They say that’s who they were training in that wing for the last few years, a new group of Shadowhunters for the Carcere. They work with the most dangerous Downworlders out there, it’s dangerous work. They can’t train at the Scholomance locations any more so they’re using the Academy. We’re all trying to figure out how you get a reference. No one ever saw the students. It’s secret but consuls and Inquisitors, all the best of the best, go through it,” he explained. 

This time when Jem glanced at Will, their eyes met. Will raised his eyebrows just a fraction. Jem nodded. They let Giuseppe talk as they walked back to the buildings before leaving him at his dorm. His information was a little scrambled or maybe he was just excited to have had an audience to share his stories with. 

“It’s a myth and wildly illegal,” Jem said when they were alone. 

“It bears a little more investigation,” Will said. 

“I didn’t say it didn’t.” 

Will looked at him again and Jem kept his expression level even though his heart beat had to be audible. He wasn’t going to let Will work himself up over this even if he was ready to explode with the possibility of a lead after so long.

### The Letter of the Law 

The last official records for the Carcere program were from the 1600s after which point it was deemed incompatible with the Law and shut down. They had found more than they had expected in the archives of the Academy itself. They were both failing the course they were there to take but it didn’t really matter any more. It wasn’t why they had come. 

The Carcere program had been offered to Downworlders convicted of capital offenses in Clave courts or tribunals. Those sentenced to die could instead be offered the option to work off their crimes in the service of the Clave. As near as Will could tell, it was offered haphazardly. It was Jem who finally found the pattern. 

“What was that one convicted of?” Jem asked. 

“Wearing improper shoes on Sunday.”

“William.”

Will grabbed the heavy bound copy of ancient court records written by hand in cramped Latin. He had never hated a book or imagined he could hate a book before starting this research. Four hours in and he was ready to set the entire library on fire. For some horrific reason some of the Shadowhunter scribes hadn’t picked up the new-fangled trend of spacing out words until well in the 1400s, nearly three hundred years after the rest of Europe.

Once he figured out unspaced Latin, the next book he picked up was written in a vernacular language that Will couldn't even identify. He had never considered standard spellings to be a blessing until he was looking at a document out of Wales of all places that attempted to transliterate Welsh into English. Other documents were in meticulously spelled and grammatically perfect Latin or English. This one was one of the unspaced ones and it took him a moment to find what Jem wanted.

“Compelling an entire village to line up neatly so he could eat them one after another,” Will said after a moment of reading.

“This warlock opened three portals simultaneously, trying to open a hole into the void or something,” Jem said. 

“You say that like it’s a revelation.”

“That isn’t normal.” 

“Thusly the death sentence, you don’t condemn someone to death for taking a bath or eating scones, it tends to be a rather abnormal thing that one is punished for.”

“You’re mood is delightful today, I’m so glad I get to spend this time with you.”

“I’m a gift.” 

“A gift from that aunt no one likes.”

“Now just a-”

Jem cut him off, “What I meant is that they are exceptionally powerful. Most vampires can only compel two or three people at the same time and some not even that. Opening a portal to a demon realm is such difficult magic that some warlocks never master it. That’s why they’re offered Carcere.” 

“That doesn’t answer the question of what they do once they’ve signed their contract of service to,” Will grabbed a nearby sheet of paper to flick it for effect, “The righteousness of Raziel’s Law and the protection of the mortal plane and the baking of blueberry scones.” 

“If you mention scones again, I’m going throw one at your head.” 

The Carcere records, like those from the broader Scholomance were all sealed. There was no hint of what they actually did. Secondary reflections didn’t didn’t even appear in the records of Institute heads even when they were the ones to have orchestrated the capture of a criminal who was later offered a Carcere contract. Once the contract had been offered, the trail ended. Will’s theory was that they were still in some mountain stronghold. 

They combed the Academy library and didn’t find much but everything they did find made Will’s skin crawl. It was wildly illegal, not just an affront to the letter of the law but to the spirit of it as well.

Will had always found the details of the law to be a little restrictive but he had always believed that what the Shadowhunters did, they did for the right reasons. It was about protecting the world. It was about protecting the mundanes. If the meticulous little rules about hiring warlocks were grating, the broader Law and the reasons behind it were still valid. The idea of finding horrific criminals and then sending them back out into the world on the argument that they were useful felt wrong.

They spent the last two weeks of their course digging for information not only at the Academy but through Alicante. Will even charmed his way into one family's personal archives because their grandfather had been a scholar on the topic. It was scattered information and by the time they were preparing to go home, they didn't have a complete picture but they had enough to know it wasn't going to be something nice.

“I hope this is a false lead,” Will said. 

He'd been holding that thought close for too long and it slipped out as they began the process of packing up their things. They were walking down stone staircase to the storage rooms in the basement to retrieve their trunks to have everything shipped back to London. 

“It’s the best possibility we’ve had in years,” Jem said. “The Carcere people are obviously capable of wiping out records even from the Clave’s own archives, which is the only theory we’ve got that explains why even Charlotte can’t find anything about her in the Silent City.” 

“But it means she’s there,” Will said shouldering open the door. 

His mask was cracking, he could hear it in his own voice. The emotions were going to start showing up on his face any moment and he didn’t try to stop it. The mask always slipped when Tessa was involved and there was no one here to see it except for Jem so he let it happen. Jem held his gaze but said nothing as they stepped into the room full of student’s trunks and baggage, many with family emblems stamped on the ends, others with Institute seals. 

Will kept talking as he walked down the shelves trying to remember where they’d left their luggage. He needed this rush of fear and worry out before they headed for the tunnel back to Westminister from the Gard. He needed to not be feeling this so brightly when he had to face Charlotte and Henry. 

“Either they took her because they decided she was a good candidate for being assigned to the project but if that kid was right, then it’s a prestigious appointment. They don’t give prestigious appointments to under-trained orphan fourteen year old girls with warlock blood. They give them to sons of important people. Which means they took her because they thought they could train her to be a shapeshifter like those monstrous warlocks tried to when she was a little girl,” Will said. 

He was rambling. Jem was giving him space to talk. They were wandering down different alleys of the cramped storage room. Will trailed his fingers along the shelf as he went and when he caught a glimpse of Jem through a gap in the shelves, he had his hand wrapped around the angel necklace. Will lost sight of him again and kept talking about everything they knew just to hear it out loud, just to fill the space.

"And there remains the problem that she has never massacred an entire village or attempted to destroy the fabric of the universe or tried to wipe out the entire Seelie court. They have no right, under their own laws, to offer her a contract. If they refuse to accept her as a Nephilim then they must then accept her as a Downworlder and the Accords still apply. It doesn't make any sense," Will said. 

It was a discussion they had had back and forth multiple times. The Carcere program had been shut down centuries before because it was illegal and under the Accords it was more than that. It was not just against the spirit of the law but against the explicit letter of the law. The Accords forbid such a thing even in the case of the worst Downworld criminals. There would be no Shadowhunter run prisons. There would be death if the crime called for it or there would be fines or restrictions. The Carcere couldn't exist. Shouldn't exist at all. And if it did, it shouldn't have ever touched Tessa. 

Will heard a thunk. 

“What the fuck did you leave in the trunk? A library?” Jem asked from somewhere down the other side of the room. 

“No, it was empty, all the books I brought are upstairs, you’ve found someone else’s. There have to be other people from London here. Ours are down this side,” Will said. 

He had been sure he’d pushed them into a low shelf near the back way and there they were. He pulled them out. Neither of them had bothered with family crests, the trunks were the Institute’s standard luggage with a name label pasted on. He flipped them open to make sure there weren’t mice in them and they were both as empty as he remembered. Jem didn’t appear to carry his own. 

“Listen, you lazy bastard. I love you but I’m not carrying your things for you like a bellhop,” Will said.

“Come here,” Jem said. 

Will came around the shelf to find him standing in front of an almost identical trunk to the ones that Will had just pulled down. It was the same dark leather with dull brass fasteners and the same London Institute seal but no name. Jem had it open but Will couldn’t see inside it from where he stood.

He paused in the alley between the shelves and looked at the open lid of the trunk. 

He didn’t need to be told. 

Jem tossed him a book over the lid and he caught it with one hand. A slightly battered copy of Vathek that he couldn’t bring himself to open because he was sure that his handwriting would be in it. He'd written her a collection of terrible poems in the books he'd sent with her. He held the volume and watched as Jem pushed some things around and came up with Tessa's jade necklace, the one he had given her the day she had left, dangling between his fingers. 

"She was here," Jem said. 


	3. Part Three: Heroes and Villains

 

### Research

 

The process of unraveling the Carcere had Jem sitting up in bed, through his worst days, making charts about how the Clave command chains worked for special projects. It took sifting and sifting and sifting through letters and memos and financial reports that he dug out of the public archives. Anything in classified archives or in private Institute files was off limits to him so he often had only sketchy pictures to work with but it was enough to start building theories. 

He had become an expert on the eradication of the Chrinta in the Amazon rainforest. The spider demons had been nesting around a tiny flaw in the world’s warding that let them trickle in from one dimension to another. For a long time they had stayed in the depths of the forest but since the turn of the century had been steadily creeping outward and leaving mundanes poisoned and delirious. It had taken nearly six Institutes in three countries the better part of the 1850s to destroy them all and close the rift. It had been a complex coalition but fully official. 

From there, he’s investigated the destruction of the Yarlo coven of vampires. They had been hunted down across Northern Europe for - as near as Jem could tell - the crime of being rich. The Shadowhunter families involved in the purge had all come out of it filthy rich from the spoils. That hadn’t been Clave sanctioned. Not officially. There were enough documents to suggest that the Consul and Inquistor knew but it all happened before the Accords so no one looked at it too hard. 

The Carcere had to operate with Clave approval.

It was the only way that records could be changed and the only way that it could employ Shadowhunters. Once he had been through the Yarlo and Chrinta and a handful of similar cases, he knew what he was looking for and could turn his attention to current Clave memos and data and start the process of figuring out who knew this secret.

Sometimes, when it all got to be too much he wrapped a hand around Tessa’s angel and let its ticking calm him. It would warm and cool sometimes and in the worst of his fevers, he could swear that it glowed with an warm golden light that pushed into his joints and his failing lungs and left him shuddering but that was always the darkest point. The hallucination heralded his recovery with such consistency that he had started to anticipate them, even wish for them. 

She had always sat with him when he was awake and held his hand through the fevers and the angel wasn’t as comforting as she was but it was better than being without her entirely. It wasn’t connected to her but somehow, some tiny part of him couldn’t be convinced of that logic. As long as its little metal heart kept beating, hers must be beating along with it somewhere in the world. He just had to figure out where.

Will’s approach to research was quite a bit different. There were days when he would sit and help Jem sift through data but he spent a far greater amount of time in gambling dens and pubs and worse places. He talked and flirted and bribed and listened and followed every lead as far as it could take him. 

He threw himself down into a chair at a vampire party and grinned at the warlock in the frock coat beside him. The man was tall and angular and cut his eyes to Will when he sat down. His eyes were the yellow green of a cats, right down to the slit pupil. Will leaned forward but Magnus Bane turned back to his drink without a word. 

“I didn’t think DeQuincey liked anyone who wasn’t a vampire,” Will said without missing a beat.

“He certainly isn’t fond of Shadowhunters barely out of diapers. It’s a miracle you got through the door at all. Not that it matters as I’m not here to see him, nor am I here to see you,” Magnus Bane pointed at Will without putting his drink down. Will gave him a charming smile that he knew wouldn’t get him anywhere but some habits were hard to break.

“I have been all over this city and I even took a rather crowded ferry over to the continent and I keep finding the same answers. Which is a lot of nothing most days but apparently, you’ve been making the same rounds, asking the same questions and you’re not a Shadowhunter so perhaps they’ve told you something different than what they’ve told me,” Will said. 

“Are you also interested in the intricacies of turn of the century French fashions?” Magnus asked adjusting his coat and then returning to studiously ignoring Will and watching the crowd of vampires.

Will kept talking.

He had had four separate contacts tell him that a warlock had been asking after Carcere as well and he’d eventually managed to track those rumours to Magnus. It surprised him. Magnus Bane had a reputation for being a Clave ally but here he was, digging into the one of the Clave’s best buried secrets. 

Will explained about the vampire he’d gone to see in Chelsea who had had one of her coven taken for the Carcere back in the 1740s, long after it was officially closed down. She couldn’t tell him much but the confirmation that the program had persisted felt like a breakthrough in the moment. She had also been the first to mention Magnus though not by name. 

“Shut up,” Magnus said conversationally as Will got to the third contact that they shared. 

“I am willing to bet that I know things that you don’t know,” Will said. 

Magnus didn’t answer him. He stood up and walked away. Will hesitated and then followed. He expected Magnus to go get a drink but instead the warlock cut down a hallway, brocade jacket flapping, and when Will followed him, Magnus grabbed him by the arm and spun him into a tiny library before waving his fingers at the door. It slammed shut hard with a little spark of light and Will dropped his fingers to his wrist sheaths but Magnus didn't attack, he just paced away and then spun back. 

“You have the striking idiocy of the young mixed together with all the impressive arrogance of your kind. It is not a good mix,” Magnus said. 

“I don’t know about all that, I think I’m pretty charming,” Will said. 

“If the Clave finds you asking questions about the Carcere or the Scholomance or the Barochini Inquisition, they will give you a scolding and send you back to your training,” Magnus said.

“What is the Baro-” Will started.

“I, on the other hand, as well as Lorelei and Glendon and Chin Fei and whoever else you manage to dig up, if we’re found asking these questions? We vanish, quietly but not pleasantly. I’m assuming that this is just a curiosity for you Mr. Herondale and not a coordinated plan of entrapment for any of the rest of us but it would be appreciated if it would stop. I would rather your over active curiosity not be the reason I wind up dead,” Magnus said. 

“I am not seeking to have anyone arrested. I just need to know what they do and where they are. I already have a few names to put in the who column,” Will said. 

Will could see the curiosity warring with annoyance on Magnus’s face. Will wondered if he had been sent to Magnus intentionally, if everyone else had dropped hints until he was the one left to deal with the nosy Shadowhunter. 

“I wish you no ill. The Clave would not be happy to discover what we’ve been doing and maybe I wouldn’t suffer as much as you would but I don’t have any desire to get caught. I want information, that’s all and I’m willing to share what we find,” Will said letting his own bravado fall away. 

“Start talking then,” Magnus said.

 

### A Prison Cell

 

Tessa’s new rooms didn’t masquerade as dignified accommodations. There would be no question of her right to receive guests or take an evening stroll here. The walls were that same buttery yellow stone as everything else in Alicante but they didn’t have the same polished warmth of the Academy buildings. She had a bed and a wash table and a rail to hang clothing on but nothing more, not even a chair.

The door didn’t have a handle on the inside. 

At first seeing anyone who wasn’t Gloria Cartwright and the nameless tutor was a relief but the man who showed her from the carriage to her room was addressed as Warden and never given another name in her presence. She brushed her fingers along the cuff of his shirt when he paused at a doorway. She didn’t transform right away but held it in her mind until the door closed. 

She changed out of her dress and into a pair of loose trousers and a shirt she found hanging on the wall. They were pale blue and cheaply made of a scratchy fabric but the warden was twice her size and she couldn’t have transformed into him while wearing a corset. Even in the prison clothes, it was an uncomfortable fit. 

His name was Marcus Goulding and he was a mundane with a weak strain of the sight who didn’t know much about the Clave. He usually brought prisoners in after dark and usually in irons and most of them didn’t look human. Tessa had unnerved him. She was a sixteen year old girl and looked it. He didn’t know what they did with the prisoners, only that they came in and out and eventually disappeared altogether. He secretly called the Shadowhunters the tattooed freaks. 

She was woken up the next day not by the arrival of her things as she had expected but by a Shadowhunter with graying hair, wearing gear and with a seraph blade hanging loosely from his hand. He’d activated it before opening the door, she saw the flash of light through the crack in the door. She was glad she had slept in the scratchy clothes as she scrambled to sit up. 

“Hello Shapeshifter,” he said.

“Good morning,” she said. 

“I like the little girl suit you’re wearing, it’s pretty, what do you actually look like?”

“Maybe I actually look like this.” 

That got a bark of laughter. He waved the seraph blade at her and she stood up, pushing her hair back. She transformed into Bernard Montcalm just to see if a Shadowhunter face would rattle the man in the doorway but he did nothing more than raise his eyebrows. She kept the change and let him lead the way out into the hall. 

For the first few weeks, her life was much the same as it had been at the Academy though the training itself seemed to be more a process of loading her with specific changes. All Downworlder. She had practiced over the months to be able to control Downworlder changes but it was still imperfect. 

She would change, they would ask her to demonstrate some of the Downworlder’s powers, and then they would move on. She transformed into werewolves and they’d test whether or not she could stand the touch of silver. She couldn’t but when she turned back, the damage wasn’t permanent. She started to practice cycling through changes faster to compensate for the tests. 

They could call them tests if they wanted but once they’d done it once, it should have been enough proof. They didn’t do it once. They’d splash holy water at a vampire and by the time it hit her, she was wearing a mundane body. Then another vampire change and another ‘experiment’ and she’d flip the change before the pain could start. It was exhausting. 

They were building a library inside her. 

It was during this process of accumulating changes that she met Vivian Paradiso, a warlock with pale blue skin, bright blue hair and a splash of orange scales running up and down her limbs. As soon as Tessa changed, her mind was overtaken with a rush of Portuguese that came on too fast for her to dig into Vivian’s memories for a translation. 

Tessa was prepared to write off this change as one of the impossible ones - some Downworlder changes were simply too hard to hold - when she opened her eyes and the warlock whose body she wore caught sight of the Shadowhunter across the table. She barely caught the growl of rage that wasn’t hers. She clamped down on the reaction and Vivian relaxed in her mind, wary but not trying to wrench back control. 

“Could we have a demonstration of what that one can do, Gray?” 

The Shadowhunter who had come to pick her up from her prison and take her off to training was always careful not to get within reach of her and he had never introduced himself. He had dropped the Miss that Miss Cartwright had always used and simply called her Gray. A little less polite, shaving off one more layer of civility.

The man was still a stranger to Tessa but not to the woman whose skin she wore. Vivian’s consciousness started feeding Tessa information in a rush of images and impressions and imperfect English. Like she was doing it on purpose. 

Johnathan Brightlace had been with the Carcere since he was young. Vivian passed Tessa a memory of him in his twenties, just as barrel chested but with his hair the colour of straw rather than silver. The power of her dislike for him made Tessa uneasy to even be sitting in the same room. 

Then Vivian grabbed hold of Tessa’s consciousness. 

This was the danger of a warlock change, what was a spark of personality in a human change could become an inferno of will and strength when she took a warlock’s skin. The inferno burned through her. She wasn’t in control of her own body any more. She had changed into Vivian’s body and now Vivian’s mind was in full control of that body again.

By the time Tessa choked it back, shook off the change and fell back into her own body, Johnathan was looking at her with vacant eyes and blood running from his nose and the corners of his eyes. 

She screamed before anyone else realized that something was wrong.

She reeled back from his bloody stillness and the other Nephilim who were standing behind him surged forward a second later. They were all in motion before Johnathan hit the table. The first strike took her in the side of the head and was hard enough to knock her out. 

Tessa woke up in her cell. 

She hurt. 

She had been knocked around by the Dark Sisters as a child. She’d broken her arm falling out of a tree with Will when she was eleven. But she had never hurt like this. Rather than assess the damage, she reached for a change and wrapped it tightly around her, slipping into a body that could breathe without pain. 

Vivian was the last change she had used and it was Vivian she became now. The warlock started whispering to her, a consciousness that spoke to her rather than over her and Tessa relaxed into the stories. Horrible stories but they were a distraction from the gnawing panic that came from know that the pain was waiting for her when she changed back. 

Vivian had lived and died with the program that was now training Tessa. Only four years. She had been nearly four hundred years old when they’d arrested her and she’d only survived four years of these people.

Tessa had been an idiot. This was was not something to be endured until she went home. She was far more likely to die here than she was to ever see home again. Panic and fear and pain welled up in her chest in spite of the change and she pushed it all to the side as she curled into a tight ball and let Vivian’s thoughts take hers over.

 

### The Only Guarantee

 

Will dropped down on the chair across from Jem. For once, he was working on Institute business, doing research for Charlotte on a demon sighting. His hair was a little long, falling over his forehead and hiding his eyes from view . He was his usual pale and ghostly self but he looked healthy. Will found himself cataloguing Jem's health sometimes, the exact palour of his skin, the way his pupils changed, when and if he favoured his joints. Jem had been given less than five years and he should have been approaching that expiration date but his health hadn't changed much since he was about fourteen. 

"What are doing?" Jem said. 

"I'm thinking," Will said. 

"You're staring at me like I am a specimen and you are a naturalist."

"Yes well, you're an unusual specimen."

"Am I?"

"Can I ask you something?" 

Jem looked up at his tone and closed the book. He shook his hair out of his eyes and raised his eyebrows at Will. Will's carefully prepared speech, all his explanations, fell apart under that gaze. He was going to mess this up somehow. He was going to say it all wrong and ruin it. He opened his mouth and started talking anyways. 

"I want to be parabatai." 

Jem snorted, "With who? You hate everyone."

Will hadn't expected that response and he stared at Jem for a moment too long and Jem frowned at  him. 

"Me?" 

"Of course you, you bastard."

"That's an idiot idea, I am dying if you haven't noticed."

Will took a deep breath and cut him off before he could keep talking, "You're my family, James. I can't lose any more family. Next year we'll be placed abroad and the only guarantee I have that we will not end up on opposite sides of the globe is this. They can't separate a parabatai team. They won't. You may be dying but hell, we are all dying. We go out and put ourselves in the path of monsters straight out of someone's worst nightmares. It is a miracle that we're not dead yet.”

“Different kind of dying, you being a reckless idiot is not the same as the poison and the drug eating away at my body,” Jem said. 

“Why not? I would rather stand with you than with anyone else. Whether it is on that battlefield or on death's doorstep when that moment comes for either of us, I don't care. We're partners, we're brothers, we've trained together for nearly our entire lives, we'll be good,” Will said.  

"I'll consider it," Jem said. 

"That's better than calling me an idiot," Will said sitting back. He was pretty sure Jem was saying it to shut him up. There were five months to finalize this before Jem turned 18 and it wasn’t a possibility any more. Will already knew that he’d try and stall it but the prospect of separation had to bother him as much as it bothered Will.

It had to. 

He'd leaned forward as he'd delivered his little speech and now he leaned back and gave a careless shrug like it didn't really matter. It mattered more than he was willing to admit. Losing Tessa was still a gaping wound in a corner of his heart that he wasn't sure was ever going to heal properly. 

Ella, his family, Tess. So many people were already so far beyond his reach. With their 18th birthday's approaching in the next year, London would be out of reach as well. He needed Jem and he suspected, hoped was maybe a more accurate word, that Jem needed him too. 

"Stop looking at me like that, I said I would consider it, you idiot," Jem said. Then he shook his head and left Will sitting alone with the dusty tomes of research books open to demonology charts cataloguing horns and tails. Will sat and stared at the book like it had answers. His heart was beating too fast for just making a suggestion. Please don't leave me alone. Those were the words echoing in his chest with each heart beat. Please don't leave me alone. 

 

### It

 

Tessa had healed from the beating she had taken for killing Johnathan. Her body seemed capable of repairing itself even without her presence in it. She had checked in sometimes but she had even started teaching herself to sleep in other bodies so that she could avoid the cracked ribs longer.

She wasn’t removed from the cell for days, maybe as long as a week. The silent arrival of a plate of food twice a day and the movement of sunlight through a high window were her only markers of time. She was bored and angry and hurt and terrified and the emotions cycled as she lay on the bed and worked her way through changes trying to learn what she could from their memories.

“It’s violent and uncontrollable,” a voice outside the cell growled and she scrambled out of bed and snapped into a Shadowhunter body. What happened if they killed her when she was wearing someone else’s skin? Would she die? A little voice deep inside her

“You can’t kill this one,” someone else answered sounding bored.

“It killed Jonathan.”

“1032 killed Jonathan. She always hated him. We should have considered that before having him in the room when Gray changed.”

“If it can’t control its powers, then it’s a hazard.”

“It’s a hazard worth training. Go back home. The Shifter is the only one of its kind. We can’t replace it if you kill it because you’re having a bad day. So fuck off and go home.”

“We kill them when they outlive their usefulness, Wes. That’s how it works.”

“This one hasn’t outlived its usefulness, get out of here before you wake up half the Menagerie with your ranting.”

It.

The voices retreated. Still arguing but growing fainter. Tessa sat on the edge of the bed and took slow deep breaths. Knowing that someone would protect her from being killed should have been a relief but he had called her it. _It was still useful._ What if she stopped being useful?

Once upon a time, the Nephilim had been nearly mythical to her. Charlotte and Henry had been people she had known and cared for but to an eight year old girl, the warriors who passed through the building in their gear with their swords and their knives had seemed like knights from stories. They were off to battle evil.

These were the heroes.

These were the heroes and she was their enemy to be used and then killed off to protect the world. That’s what they did. They protected the world. Which meant that they thought she was a threat.

“What did I do?!” she yelled at the door and was so startled to remember she was in another body that she fell out of the change. The sentence rose from a man’s tenor to her own higher and sharper voice. No one answered.

Nothing answered.

No heroes or villains.

Just empty walls. 

 

### The Reason for Allies

 

 

Four months later, the parabatai ceremony was over shadowed by a meeting with Magnus only three days before. Will had brought Jem along to this one and they'd met in Magnus's townhouse. Jem had only met Magnus a handful of times including a long afternoon when they'd gone through all of Jem's Clave research and for the first time he'd tried to fully explain it to someone else. Magnus had found holes he hadn't been able to see and managed to find new avenues for him to investigate and uncover new dead ends. 

It was a spectacular collection of dead ends. 

And yet, there were things they knew.

Jem could pretty reliably track which Shadowhunters were working on Carcere projects based on their schedules and their movements but only when he found those details. Most of those things didn't make it into reports so it was an incomplete picture. He had suspicions about who knew more but he didn't have anything actionable. The one time Will had tried to start a conversation with one of Jem's likely participants, it had ended up with a door slammed in his face. By the time he’d arrived home Charlotte was furious with them and spitting threats and orders to leave other Clave members alone. 

This time, they weren't meeting to talk about his dead ends. They were here to talk about something Magnus knew. 

"Lilianne has been spotted in Paris," Magnus said.

"Delightful news, is she shopping for the season's new fashions?" Will asked. 

Magnus twisted in his chair so he wasn't looking at Will. Jem glanced at Will to see if he knew who Lilianne was but he didn't seem to. He was just needling Magnus who had no patience for it today. Will muttered something that included both a swear word and the word "childish" but Magnus ignored him. He spoke to Jem directly about the leader of the Pere Lachaise coven who had vanished five years before. The rest of the coven had long claimed that the Nephilim were involved in her disappearance. 

"Is she's particularly talented at compulsion?" Jem asked. 

She wasn't but she was known for her subjugates. Creating them was easier for her than for most vampires and they tended to be more loyal than most. Magnus didn't seem to particularly like her but he was planning to go to the continent to try and meet with her and figure out what she knew. 

"So when do we leave?" Will asked. 

"You don't. I am telling you as a courtesy. If I show up with Nephilim in tow, the coven will rip me into tiny bits. They might rip me into tiny bits simply for the rumours that I have struck up a friendship with the two of you," Magnus said. 

"Why Magnus, I never knew, do you truly consider us friends?" Will said with a delighted smile that did nothing to temper his sarcasm. 

"William," Jem warned. 

"I'll see you in three weeks," Magnus said without addressing Will at all. 

Will attempted to convince him they could be discrete. Then he complained about being left out but none of his arguments did anything to change Magnus's mind. The value of allying with a Downworld contact at all was for moments like this when a Shadowhunter couldn't be involved. Jem finally kicked Will hard enough to make him see reason and let it go.  

Magnus hadn't shared why he wanted to know about the Carcere but Jem assumed it was a single name the same way it was for them. They had never given him Tessa's name and he had never shared his reasons. Even with the lack of details, Jem trusted him and it was a relief to have someone else in this who wasn't Will.

Even Charlotte didn't know the depths of their research which had skirted some legality lines when they'd hit the first blocks in acquiring documents. They had stolen things and decided she was better off not knowing. Once they were keeping one secret, it snowballed. Now they were keeping most of the project a secret from Charlotte and Henry. 

They went through the parabatai ceremony with the prospect of news from Magnus weighing heavily on their minds. Without family or a class at the Academy, there wasn't anyone to attend the ceremony anyways. Just Charlotte and Henry and whoever had come for the Enclave meeting that afternoon.  As far as Jem cared, it mattered little. It wasn't about any one else, it was about him and Will and the vow and as the circles of fire flared and the runes were drawn, it felt like it had been a long time coming.

An inevitability. They'd always been tied together. Now they had the runes to prove it. 

 

### A Day From Hell

 

Gideon Lightwood had not wanted this job and was not exactly relieved to have it. His father had pulled strings so that he could go straight from his year in Madrid to this and as presented it as a gift. Gideon's plan had been to stay on with Madrid, spend a year or two and possibly be eligible to take Ernesto Abascal's place when he retired from running the Barcelona Institute. He had a plan. His plan had not included his father's meddling and somehow Benedict had won the argument and here he was. 

He sat with a drink and his gear unbuckled but not taken off. It had been the day from hell. He had killed three people. People. Humans. Mundane humans. 2 of them nuns. It shouldn't have been any more or less horrifying if they had been nuns or dock workers but it was worse. They had been nuns. He was going back over the day piece by piece trying to find the moment where he could have made the right choice to avert it all. He couldn't find it. 

He should have stayed in Spain. 

The Carcere job was about connections. It was supposed to be easy work too. His father had been so pleased with that detail, a nice comfortable position for his eldest son where introductions could be made to the best old families as though it was all a society season instead of a war.

They were living in a war, fighting in a war.

There was evil in the world and it was beating at the gates, trying to destroy everything and the Nephilim were meant to keep it back. Who cared whether or not you had dinner with the Montcalms or the Penhallows? Benedict Lightwood cared, immensely and so to placate him and because he couldn't find a way out that wouldn't embarrass the entire family, he had taken the position. He hoped he could find a way to be sure that Gabriel wouldn't end up on the same path. 

Gideon was a member of a five man team, all Nephilim, one team leader and two pairs of soldiers. Gideon even liked three of the four other people on his team. And usually it was easy work.

They picked up the operative from the holding cells. They went to the location where that particular skill set was required. They made sure that the skills were used to complete what needed done. They brought the operative back to the cells which they called the Menagerie as long as no one from upper management was in the same room. 

Gideon's team worked with vampires. They had gone through special training, they were heavily armed and had been given permanent runes that would render their blood sacred so they couldn't be bitten. There were six vampires in the Menagerie and Lilianne had never been the one Gideon preferred to work with. She could subjugate an entire room just by slipping her blood into the punch bowl. Not even enough to taste and every human in the room would turn their head to her if she so much as thought it.

It was unsettling. 

And deeply immoral. 

This assignment had been immoral but no one cared what Gideon thought was immoral or unethical and he'd stopped sharing his opinions on the matter months ago. They had been in a small European country where Lilianne had bled into a punch bowl and taken control of a very important vote to be held the next day. They voted in favour of the Clave's interests and everything went as it was supposed to. 

It went as it was supposed to until the moment when it didn't.

Gideon had been sitting at the back of the hall, wearing gear and heavily glamoured. His job was to head off any bizarre behaviour if the adoration for their mistress happened to take anyone too deeply. He had watched as she made the assembled vote as she wanted them too but she was hidden away out of view with Lucas and Isaac. Around the room, Daniel, the one person on the team Gideon particularly wanted to strangle, and Hassan, who he liked more than the others, watched with the same bored expression he wore. 

Dull. 

Immoral and unethical and vastly against the law that Gideon had once sworn to uphold. 

But dull. 

Then Isaac had skidded into the main room from a doorway behind the speaker of the house and all three of them had snapped to attention. Lilianne was gone. Isaac was bleeding from a torn wound at his shoulder that had missed his arteries. Lucas was dead. The attacks had been done with finger nails and a letter opener, not her teeth but she had still gone for the jugular. 

Lilianne was gone into the sewers and steam tunnels below the building. 

That had been fifteen days before the nuns. 

She had gone home to France and the tracking spells made it easy enough to follow her back. Rather than attempt to disappear into her coven, she had instead found a deconsecrated church not far from the cemetery they called home and had started collecting up a small army of subjugates. She had taken the neighbours first and then she had taken everyone from a little orphanage a few streets over. The nuns, the children, the cook and the grounds keeper. 

She'd eaten her way through most of the children before they'd arrived. 

"I've decided if I'm going to die, I shall die on my own terms. I am through playing obedient pet for your insipid plots. I was charged with death so bring me death, Oh Nephilim, kill me and go home and those of you who survive can go home and suck angel cock," she had declared. 

She waved her arm grandly from where she sat perched on the pulpit up at the front of the church. They had brought along the local Shadowhunters so it wasn't just the four of them and for a moment it looked almost comical. An army of bristling warriors against a seventeen year old girl in a tattered ball gown. She looked like a child. Brown curls, dark eyes, pale skin that held a healthy rose glow from all the blood she had drank. A little hand lay curled on the ground below her. It must have belonged to a body slumped behind her pulpit. 

They had killed her in the end but it had been a bloody battle.

Her subjugates had killed three Shadowhunters and injured more but still more of the subjugates had died than anyone else. People who hadn't deserved it. Nuns. Children. An entire family whose only crime was living beside an old church that a mad vampire had chosen for her last stand. 

Gideon finished his drink and then pulled a pile of papers towards him to start writing up an official report. He hadn’t been let out of sifting through the carnage to drink. While the others were making lists of the dead and clearing memories and returning people to their homes, he had been given the paperwork. 

 

### The Boy From London 

 

William Herondale was an idiot. He had always known that. Jem and Tessa had always kept him from destroying the world entirely in a moment of undiluted idiocy but he knew he was capable of it. He had a temper and as much as he excelled at strategy, he was impulsive. He knew all this. 

This plan had been stupid even by his own standards. 

Two days after his parabatai ceremony had been completed, he had been on a ferry for France. There were things he needed to see for himself, questions he had to ask for himself. As he watched England retreat off the back of the boat, he knew he was being selfish and unreasonable but he had come too far too turn back now. 

After an insufferably long time trapped in crowded coaches and miserable roadside inns, he had arrived in Paris. He had never traveled this far from home. He had been to Alicante on a few rare occasions but that hadn’t felt like this trip. 

He could feel the distance. 

Maybe he what he could feel was the distance from Jem. 

It hadn’t been a comfortable holiday. He stumbled through ordering meals in inns by repeating what he heard other people say and then waiting to be surprised by what arrived. French was a language with its roots in Latin, he knew Latin, why did French sound so incomprehensible? He should not have gone alone. At the very least he should have brought Jem but Jem had been so sure that letting Magnus handle it was sufficient and Will was losing his mind with all the waiting. 

Then Will arrived in Paris and lost his mind entirely. 

Magnus was already gone. He’d had his meeting with the coven and gotten as far away as possible before Lilianne’s plan to go down in a blood bath could be realized. Will had asked the right questions of the right people, that is the ones he could speak to. He found his way to the little abandoned church and spent the next few days in a haze of adoration and vampire blood. 

He couldn’t even remember how it had happened. 

The two Carcere agents who found him among the nuns and the mundanes were baffled to find a Shadowhunter wearing traveling clothes mixed in with the citizens. Will was still reeling from the shock of Lilianne’s death which had left all her subjugates shaky and unfocused. They asked questions and Will answered them without his conscious mind taking part in the conversation. 

He had a flash of clarity when they pushed for who and why and how he had known where to come to keep names out of it. He did not say Magnus Bane. He did not say Theresa Starkweather. He said just about everything else. Magnus’s voice reminding him that what was a curiosity for him could be a death sentence for someone else was there in the back of his mind even with the haze. 

They had to hope that the haze from the time as a subjugate would be enough to keep his memory from being too much of a problem. Erasing a Shadowhunter’s memory was difficult to do and they hadn’t brought anything they would need to make it happen. The Parisian Nephilim had been given a mostly true story of a rogue vampire and so while the Carcere often did have to erase the memories of their own allies, they hadn’t been prepared for it today. 

They sent the boy home. Hassan actually dragged him to the train station himself and bought the ticket to take him back to the coast. William Herondale was no one to them. Just a boy, curious and a little too zealous but not dangerous. Hassan made a joke about calling them when he'd completed all his training and they'd see about getting him a real job. 

Will had blinked stupidly at him. 

"The effects wear off, you'll be fine, go back to London," Hassan said before leaving Will in the little train compartment with nothing but the clothes on his back and enough money for a ferry ticket tucked into his jacket pocket. 

When Gideon submitted his paperwork, Hassan would add his own report to the file mentioning the boy from the London Institute who had come to Paris seeking information on the Carcere program but neither of them thought of it again. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A world-building note: 
> 
> I am sure it says somewhere in canon that a vampire subjugate will die if their master does but I’m going to assume that that implies someone like Camille's subjugate Archer who has been kept alive by a vampire for decades and decades and whose body is dependent on the vampire blood. Will and the others were so newly subjugated that it was just an unpleasant shock to their systems but even the mundanes recovered. This is also how something like Lilianne’s assignment to control the parliamentary debate could be carried out. One dose of blood had as much of a permanent effect as it did on Will in Clockwork Angel it’s just that because of her particular power, it was far stronger for the time that it lasted. Not just a draw to their master but an immediate desire to do what she wanted. 
> 
> Also - jeez, I haven't been this mean to Tessa since I wrote Infernal War almost two years ago.


End file.
